Concussion Inc.: The End of Football As We Know It
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Concussion Inc.: The End of Football As We Know It

Concussion Inc.: The End of Football As We Know It

by Irvin Muchnick

Overview

Inside the controversial and newsworthy issue of concussions in American football — Muchnick’s trademark no-holds-barred investigation reveals the corruption and scandals in real time

Traumatic brain injury in football is not incidental, but an inevitable and central aspect of the sport. Starting in high school, through college, and into the NFL, young players face repeated head trauma, and those sustained injuries create lifelong cognitive and functional difficulties.

Muchnick’s Concussion Inc. blog exposed the decades-long cover-up of scientific research into sports concussions and the ongoing denial to radically reform football in North America. This compilation from Muchnick’s no-holds-barred investigative website reveals the complete head injury story as it developed, from the doctor who played fast and loose with the facts about the efficacy of the state-mandated concussion management system for high school football players, to highly touted solutions that are more self-serving cottage industry than of any genuine benefit.

Known for extensive reporting on the tragic story of the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, Muchnick turns his investigative analysis to traumatic brain injury and probes deep into the corporate, government, and media corruption that has enabled the $10-billion-a-year National Football League to trigger a public health crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781770411388
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication date: 02/10/2015
Pages: 300
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Irvin Muchnick: Irvin Muchnick is the author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal and Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death, and a co-author of Benoit: Wrestling with the Horror that Destroyed a Family and Crippled a Sport. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Read an Excerpt

Concussion Inc.

The End of Football as We Know It

By Irvin Muchnick

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Irvin Muchnick
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-651-8
CHAPTER 1

THE UNITED STATES OF FOOTBALL


22 SEPTEMBER 2013..........

Sean Pamphilon, a one-time ESPN production assistant who has risen to the ranks of elite sports documentary filmmakers, has produced the very best movie on the football concussion crisis, The United States of Football. Though not accessible everywhere, it has about as wide a release as is possible for any nonfiction film not directed by Michael Moore.

Whatever you do, go see USOF.

As someone who's not paid well enough to hide his natural cantankerousness, I'll be discussing below my disappointment that Pamphilon made the movie he could readily get lots of people to pay to watch, rather than the one I would have made were I as brilliant at this medium as he is. Read on for one person's critique, but at the same time, pay no attention to the grump behind the screen.

I also am proud to call Sean a friend, so let's get the narcissistic part of this review out of the way first.

For reasons that must have cost his poor parents thousands of dollars in fees to child psychologists, Pamphilon was bound and determined to include my voice in USOF. In order to fulfill that promise, he had to go out of his way to interview me at the end of a trip to the Bay Area to visit a dying relative. All kidding aside, I am grateful and humbled to be juxtaposed in this work with assorted journalistic betters in two spots.

One clip has me sourly pointing out that the National Football League's underwriting of federal research on traumatic brain injury is equivalent to the Tobacco Institute's drafting of a report by the surgeon general.

In the other one, I verbally bodyslam Dr. Joe "ImPACT" Maroon of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the NFL coterie of book-cooking scientific researchers, and, of course, World Wrestling Entertainment.

(Not for the first time, I'm struck by how the real WWE reveals more about the way the world works than the fake NFL does. USOF also has on camera Pittsburgh radio commentator Mark Madden, who boasts wrestling industry broadcast roots — along with, obviously, Chris Nowinski, the Harvard football player turned WWE performer whose investigations into his own bout with concussions permanently changed the national narrative of this issue.)

If there's too much Muchnick for everyone else's taste, there's too much Bob Costas for mine. This is not directly a knock on Costas (also an acquaintance verging on friend) — for only a fool could fail to acknowledge that he is the best we have, maybe even a little too sharp for sports. The setup in which Costas asks the unanswerable question — "What can a football official responsibly tell a parent about the safety of football?" — is perfect.

Costas with a pitchfork, however, becomes a mere rhetorical Houdini, a little too fuzzy for full-blown social criticism. Pamphilon isn't Ken Burns (thankfully), and this film doesn't need the imprimatur and homilies of the most recognized face in network sports. When Costas rips ESPN for its now-defunct violence-pandering football segment "You Got Jacked Up!" I feel the same as when he pontificates about the failure of CBS's Masters coverage to probe the controversy over the racist Augusta National Golf Club. Personally, what I want to see is whether Costas, who hobnobs with swimming's biggest stars and anchors NBC's Olympics package, will ever use his platform for a word or three about the national disgrace that is USA Swimming's generation-long widespread youth sexual abuse and cover-up, now the subject of Congressional and FBI investigations.

(Yes, your reviewer is a free-range curmudgeon. Again, the bosses at ConcussionInc.Net LLP don't pay me well enough to be otherwise.)

Though "You Got Jacked Up!" was indefensible, USOF is, if anything, too restrained in its depiction of football porn. The movie presents only one monster hit featured on that segment, with associated cackles and guffaws by Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, and the other ESPN frat boys. I believe an extended montage would have reinforced the point more powerfully than the clucking Costas and other talking heads.

In the same vein, Pamphilon's hour-and-40-minute feature should have had more than a polite once-over-lightly on all the big hits orchestrated across the "United States of football" every single day, by vicariously bloodthirsty peewee coaches whose orders are dutifully and routinely carried out, pipsqueak on pipsqueak. This is what I mean about Pamphilon not making the same film I would have ordered off the shelf.

Then again, that wasn't this director's vision. His is a frankly NFL-centric story, with a Band of Brothers frame, and it was executed sincerely and beautifully. There's no doubting the bond between Pamphilon and retired player Kyle Turley, whose life's second act as a musician provides the soundtrack, even as his activism against the NFL's default on traumatic brain injuries lurches toward a complex moral.

Always fighting, on the field and off, Turley is inspiring and tragic. But for my money, the male star of the movie is Sean Morey, the special-teams kamikaze whose frightening post-career loss of impulse control, accompanied by ritual denial, plays out in real time on the screen in painful, emotionally naked scenes with his wife. Successive footage shows Morey pushing the NFL Players Association toward honest research of concussion syndrome and fair play for its victims; censoring himself under pressure from the powers that be at a Super Bowl week press conference; and ultimately quitting in disgust the very committee he had co-founded to bring transparency and justice to this ongoing problem.

This is heartbreaking stuff, yet it's equaled and surpassed in scenes involving the two female stars of the film: Eleanor Perfetto and Sylvia Mackey, the "living widows" of, respectively, chronic traumatic encephalopathy — impaired Ralph Wenzel and Hall of Famer John Mackey. (Both women became actual widows during the shooting of the movie.) Here's where Pamphilon's camera is indeed unsparing, as he shows us legends in wheelchairs far too young, drooling, heads at grotesque angles, unable to feed themselves. Clearly, he made the cinematic decision that this particular brand of pornography was more important to exploit than the by now overly familiar video of 100 G-force collisions. And he may well be right about that.

As America cruises through yet another season of football carnage — death, catastrophic injury, silent and inexorable erosion of the gross national cognitive product, all in the name of mass entertainment at the supposed national hearth — what matters most is not whether filmmakers as talented and passionate as Pamphilon make my movies or their own. No, let me correct that: it is essential that they make only their own. Phenomena like the systematic braining of boys and the systematic raping of girls — both byproducts of our obsessive and professionalized sports culture — take hold and persist precisely because we're spectators, consumers, looking over our shoulders at what other people are saying, rather than using our own eyes and ears and other senses, and thinking and speaking for ourselves.

Let a hundred USOFs bloom. Then let's roll up our sleeves and do something about what this sport is doing to us, and what we are doing to ourselves.

CHAPTER 2

SANTA CLARA SYMPOSIUM ON SPORTS LAW AND ETHICS


12 AUGUST 2011..........

And now for a heartwarming anecdote from last weekend's Pro Football Hall of Fame festivities that you probably don't know: the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, DeMaurice Smith, crashed the dinner in Canton, Ohio, which is traditionally reserved for Hall of Famers and new inductees, and started to speak. According to NFL legend Joe DeLamielleure, blogging for Dave Pear's Independent Football Veterans, around a dozen guys walked out in the middle of Smith's remarks.

The NFLPA chief "had no idea that this audience consisted mostly of pre-1993 players," said DeLamielleure, who estimated that the Hall of Famers in attendance included around 40 guys who receive monthly pension checks of exactly $176 from the $9-billion-a-year NFL. Confronted by the retirees, Smith said the "legacy fund" negotiated in the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) would increase them to between $1,000 and $1,500 a month.

But here's the thing, football fans: a lot of NFL veterans, for good reason, don't trust the NFLPA to negotiate on their behalf and honorably administer the new centimillion- dollar legacy fund.

After a group of the richiest-rich NFLers filed their antitrust lawsuit in Minnesota, Brady v. NFL, which helped end the lockout, Judge Susan Nelson of U.S. District Court allowed a class of disabled retiree plaintiffs to join the lawsuit. That contingent, led by Carl Eller, didn't obstruct the consummation of the CBA and the resumption of the 2011 season. But the Eller class action does demand a seat at the table as the devil in the details of the legacy fund gets hashed out.

Another set of facts with which few in the general public are familiar is the sickeningly corrupt history of the NFLPA under DeMaurice Smith's predecessor, the late Gene Upshaw.

According to dissident retirees, the "union" not only abandoned their interests in a morally and financially sound pension and disability system, but also blatantly ripped off the athletic and celebrity personae of ex-players for royalties from the Madden video game and other licensed merchandise. These measures contributed to feathering a bloated and overpaid NFLPA bureaucracy and enriched Upshaw in particular (along with "super agents" with NFLPA ties, such as Tom Condon) to the tune of impossible millions.

A new book, The Unbroken Line: The Untold Story of Gridiron Greats and Their Struggle to Save Professional Football — co-authored by former Dallas Cowboys tight end Billy Joe DuPree and his lawyer, Spencer Kopf — traces the narrative to the end-game negotiations of the 1982 players' strike. Today the key fault line in the fight to design equitable pension and disability plans is between active players (who tend to defer to their agents and the NFLPA) and those who retired before 1993.

When he accepted the NFLPA post following Upshaw's 2008 death from cancer, "De" Smith pledged "due diligence" of the organization's controversial past practices. But dissidents say he has kept the Upshaw office team intact.

What makes all this even more intriguing and grotesque is that Smith is a former aide, and by some accounts best friend, of U.S. attorney general Eric Holder. That gives fresh perspective to explanations for why President Barack Obama, a hopeless March Madness addict, crusades on superficial fan issues, such as abolition of college football's Bowl Championship Series, while saying nothing about the Big Sports public health issue of concussions.

I don't think for a minute that Obama is the problem in contemporary America. But I know he's not the solution. There was a time in our country when we elected presidents, but in the mauve days of late empire, the only thing we're doing is appointing Jocksniffers in Chief.


8 SEPTEMBER 2011..........

Today I attended the second annual Sports Law Symposium at Santa Clara University Law School. I wanted to see the advertised panel on concussions, including the keynote speech by DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the National Football League Players Association.

Dissident NFL retirees, who don't like the union's performance in safeguarding their health and interests, say Smith no-showed his scheduled appearance at last year's Santa Clara symposium.

I enjoyed the opportunity to meet symposium panelist John Hogan, the Atlanta attorney who has done valuable work representing retired players (plus others from all walks of life) on disability issues. The symposium's proceedings book includes a comprehensive and lucid paper by Hogan entitled "Concussions, Brain Injury, and NFL Disability." I highly recommend the article, available at the Dave Pear post listed below.

Regarding De Smith, I was disappointed when the organizers of the event canceled the public question-and-answer portion of the concussion session, explaining that the symposium was behind schedule. This had the unfortunate effect of giving it the feel of a rubber chicken circuit rather than a colloquy.

Smith prefaced his keynote speech with some lame jokes about his Baptist preacher forebears and asked indulgence to deviate from the concussion prompt and address the issue in the total context of "justice and fairness" for athletes. That actually was not a bad frame at all for the discussion, and it led to the panel's most interesting moments when the special guest, football great Jim Brown, gently pressed Smith on the NFLPA's second- and third-class treatment of retirees. Appropriately, Smith countered by citing improvements in this area in the new collective bargaining agreement. Some of these, such as the redistribution of hundreds of millions of new "legacy fund" dollars, remain vague in the details, but they will certainly be improvements, even if still inadequate.

My own No. 1 purpose in attending this event was to confront Smith about a cause I have been championing, essentially all by myself, for months: the idea that the joint NFL-NFLPA disability review board must reopen all claims rejected during the board tenure of the late Dave Duerson. Decisions during that period were fundamentally tainted by the participation of a player advocate who not only had publicly downplayed the link between football and mental disability in Congressional testimony, but also wound up committing suicide — whereupon he was found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy himself.

With the announcement that the concussion panel was skipping the public microphone, I joined a gaggle of audience members who pressed Smith at the podium for one-on-one dialogue. (Just ahead of me was Delvin Williams, the 56-year-old former NFL running back. Williams and Smith seemed to be discussing a private matter.)

By the time I got Smith's ear, he was being hustled out the door to his next appointment. Unburdened of the need to give my Duerson question a lot of background for the benefit of a general audience, I said, "Mr. Smith, picking up from your theme of justice and fairness, can you please tell me whether you think Duerson-reviewed claims should get a second look? Please don't answer in legalisms — the confidentiality of the review board process, or not knowing exactly how Duerson voted in individual cases or whether his votes made a difference. Isn't this Fairness 101?"

Smith regurgitated the question but didn't answer it before we separated.


7 SEPTEMBER 2012..........

Yesterday, for the second straight year, I observed the Santa Clara University Law School's annual Sports Law Symposium — the third. The event provided loads of good foundational information on topical issues in sports world dysfunction. To my pleasant surprise, the university's Institute of Sports Law and Ethics has not skimped on the second half of its titular mission.

Last year I panned the conference for allowing one of the keynote speakers, National Football League Players Association boss DeMaurice Smith, to stray from the prompt, then duck out a side door before he could be confronted with public questions. These included my own on why the NFL retirement plan board won't reopen rejected mental disability benefits claims which had been reviewed by board member Dave Duerson.

This year's Santa Clara confab was much more substantive, with fewer Kiwanis Club flourishes. I didn't mind a couple of the eye-glazing presentations on such technical arcana as the state of right-of-publicity law; after all, this was a continuing education event aimed at professional practitioners.

I still feel the symposium falls short on public colloquy, largely because of time constraints. That problem can be solved by trimming the panels, which are overloaded with the usual suspects. For example, Linda Robertson, a Miami Herald sports columnist, could hardly have been blander or more redundant.


(Continues...)
Excerpted from Concussion Inc. by Irvin Muchnick. Copyright © 2015 Irvin Muchnick. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

The United States of Football 1

Santa Clara Symposium on Sports Law and Ethics 6

Dave Duerson and Other Discontents 18

Joe Maroon and Other Pittsburgh Witch Doctors 65

Chris Nowinski and Alan Schwarz 113

Concussion Ink (In Other Words, Miscellaneous) 161

Jovan Belcher, Bob Costas, and Me 236

My Friend George Visger 246

The Michael Vick and Kris Dielman Follies 263

Ritalin - The New Growth Hormone 278

Obama the Kitsch King 283

About the Author 291

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